Farewell, Russell T Davies & David Tennant

I didn’t like Part One of this at all. I tried to watch the Confidential for it … but I hated the episode so much, I could only take half of the behind-the-scenes before deleting it from my hard drive. At least I got to hear Davies say what his intent was. Unfortunately, it was a botch as far as I was concerned. A few more crucial lines in the script might have saved it. Sometimes letting the audience fill in the blanks is not the best thing to count on. This was one of those times. We wanted to be carried, not have to do any damned work.

As for Part Two, I was shocked that overall I liked it. It was superior to Part One. It had an actual story. That the story was too damned long… well, what’s a finale for if not to be a bit self-indulgent?

Twitter was filled with stabbing of David Tennant’s performance. I don’t think any of those people have watched him closely enough to see just how fine an actor he’s been. This was also one of those times.

And Davies has been vastly underrated as a scriptwriter. This wasn’t his best effort, but it was epic, and had at least a few of his trademark touches — although too light in those touches, in my opinion.

People on Twitter also hate the new Doctor. I think that’s par for the course, though. I hated Tennant to begin with too. Eccleston wasn’t the Doctor for me immediately, either. But I was sorry to see him leave so early. On the other hand, Eccleston’s performance was of a more masculine, less sensitive, Doctor, so the entire Tennant run we’ve just witnessed would have been vastly different even had all of the stories been the same.

I really can’t wait to see what Moffat does. It’s one thing to contribute an outstanding script every now and again — having the space to do something like that permits the possibility of greatness. But when you’re in charge of everything — everything! — it’s an outright torment to capture the free time necessary to aim for greatness.

But this is Doctor Who. The program has survived for decades. Even the BBC couldn’t kill it (the idiots should have never done so!). No matter what happens, it will go on.